About the Submission phase

During the Submission phase, entries may be submitted in any language pair, per contest restrictions. Contestants are allowed to edit their entries until the end of the Submission phase.

At the end of the Submission phase, all language pairs with submitted entries will be "paused" for review by the contest administrator.

About the Hybrid phase

During the Hybrid phase, individual language pairs can be placed in any of the Submission, Qualification, or Finals phases, depending on how many entries have been submitted.

Pairs which received fewer than 3 entries during the Submission phase will likely be placed in an "extended submission" period. If at least 3 entries are eventually submitted, the pair will be moved forward to the Finals phase.

Pairs which received between 3 and 7 entries will likely be placed directly into the Finals phase, where site users who list that language pair in their profile may vote for what they feel are the best entries.

Pairs which received more than 7 entries will likely be placed into the Qualification phase, where site users rate and tag entries in an effort to determine a smaller pool of entries which should move forward into the Finals phase.

About the Finals phase

During the Finals phase, all language pairs which have received at least 3 entries will be open for site users to vote for what they feel are the best entries. Pairs with fewer than 3 entries will not be able to have a winner determined.

At the end of the Finals phase, votes will be tallied by site staff, and winners in each pair will be announced.

It is now possible to discuss and provide feedback about the competition in each language pair by visiting the "Discussion & feedback" tab within each pair listed below. Submitted entries may also be discussed individually — consider congratulating the winners!

The following are the source texts for this edition of the ProZ.com translation contests. Contest participants are given the opportunity to submit translations of these texts into the languages of their choice. If three or more translators translate a text into a given language, the contest is "on" in that language pair. To learn more about the source texts, see the "About the source texts" section below.

We're accustomed to glamour in London SE26: Kelly Brook and Jason Statham used to live above the dentist. But when Anouska Hempel's heels hit the cracked cement of the parking space outside my flat, it's hard not to think of those Picture Post photographs of royalty visiting bombed-out families during the second world war. Her mission in my modest tract of suburbia is, however, about more than offering sympathy. Hempel—the woman who invented the boutique hotel before it bore any such proprietary name—has come to give me information for which, judging by the spreads in interiors magazines and anxious postings on online DIY forums, half the property-owners in the Western world seem desperate: how to give an ordinary home the look and the vibe of a five-star, £750-a-night hotel suite. To Hem­pelise, in this case, a modest conversion flat formed from the middle slice of a three-storey Victorian semi.

"You could do it," she says, casting an eye around my kitchen. "Anyone could do it. Absolutely no reason why not. But there has to be continuity between the rooms. A single idea must be followed through." She looks out wistfully over the fire escape. "And you'd have to buy the house next door, of course." That's a joke. I think.

...

It's worth pausing, though, to consider the oddness of this impulse. The hotel room is an amnesiac space. We would be troubled if it bore any sign of a previous occupant, particularly as many of us go to hotels in order to do things we would not do at home. We expect a hotel room to be cleaned as thoroughly as if a corpse had just been hauled from the bed. (In some cases, this will actually have happened.) The domestic interior embodies the opposite idea: it is a repository of memories. The story of its inhabitants ought to be there in the photos on the mantelpiece, the pictures on the wall, the books on the shelves. If hotel rooms were people, they would be smiling lobotomy patients or plausible psychopaths.

About the source texts

The source texts for ProZ.com translation contests are typically selected by ProZ.com members with a goal of providing interesting and challenging material that enables top translators to show their talent.

To ensure a fair competition, efforts are made to avoid texts for which published translations exist. If you know of the existence of a published translation of any of these source texts into any language, please notify the site staff with a support request.

The views expressed in these texts should not be considered representative of the views of either ProZ.com staff members or the members of the ProZ.com community who have selected the texts.